Bari Weiss Has Won the War on Wokeness in Media
Paramount has acquired The Free Press for $150 million and named her editor in chief of CBS News.
In the resignation letter announcing her departure from the Grey Lady in July 2020, the opinion journalist Bari Weiss memorably lamented that "Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor."
What Weiss meant was that the extremely progressive sensibilities of elite social media users—leftist activists, educators, journalists, Democratic campaign staffers, etc.—held undue sway over the range of views that could be printed in the opinion pages. This was a constant source of frustration for Weiss, a centrist thinker critical of the left whose mission was to bring some measure of ideological diversity to the paper. (In her letter, she bragged about having published independent and contrarian writers such as Jesse Singal, Glenn Loury, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Reason's own Nick Gillespie.) But in the summer of 2020, the collective set of ideologies, habits, and preferences commonly referred to as wokeness still ruled the roost.
Much has changed in the last few years, and they are about to change even more noticeably at another large media company. Weiss is set to become the editor in chief of CBS News, and parent company Paramount has also purchased The Free Press—the media company she built from scratch in the years since leaving The New York Times—for an eye-popping $150 million.
In other words, over the course of just five years, Weiss has gone from an under-appreciated mid-level editor at a hostile (to her) newspaper to the boss of a major television news company, making millions in the process. One doesn't have to be in sympathy with Weiss' views in order to appreciate the staggering nature of this achievement: She has pulled off an elaborate Count of Monte Cristo–style revenge, if not over the Times itself, at least over the sort of people who made her experience at the Times so miserable.
And the misery, in Weiss' telling, was indeed thorough. She claims that her colleagues bullied and badgered her for soliciting opinions that conflicted with their own, even though this was the job the Times had hired her to perform. This tension had culminated, just one month prior to her resignation, in a full-on staff revolt over an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) that called for the National Guard to be deployed to quell post-George Floyd rioting in U.S. cities. Progressive staffers framed their opposition to the op-ed as a matter of workplace safety: They said this op-ed put the lives of black staffers at risk and constituted a form of violence. The argument was not: We question the wisdom of sending the army into cities to conduct law enforcement. The argument was: You should not be allowed to write this. In other words, it wasn't an argument at all.
Again, back in 2020, this was par for the course. A phenomenon that previously remained confined to elite college campuses had spread throughout social media, infecting workplaces that disproportionately hired young, uber-progressive people. It hit the media industry particularly hard—the Times was hardly alone in having to reckon with junior employees suddenly making unreasonable demands for emotional safety. Twitter may have served as the "ultimate editor," in Weiss' telling, but Slack—the online communications platform used by many businesses, particularly media companies—was where the social-media-constructed opinions of woke youngsters took shape as internal enforcement mechanisms for groupthink.
Since at least 2016, when Donald Trump made opposition to political correctness a central aspect of his presidential campaign, many libertarian, contrarian, and otherwise heterodox figures—including Weiss herself—have warned that the thing we now call wokeness would engender massive backlash. Her elevation to the position of editor in chief of CBS News is, in some sense, one of the clearest indicators yet that wokeness in media, like wokeness everywhere else, is a loser. It is losing in the marketplace of ideas, as well as the actual marketplace: Entertainment companies that once fretted about offending activists by platforming un-woke comedians have abandoned this fear. Moreover, with Trump back in charge, companies are more worried about offending a very thin-skinned president and a Federal Communications Commission that is eager to please him.
Indeed, the recent kerfuffle over Jimmy Kimmel's cancellation is a reminder that backlashes can generate much-needed correction, but they can also go completely off the rails and bring to power a political figure that has no interest in ideological consistency with respect to free speech. Trump proclaims that his will be the most pro-free speech administration in U.S. history, and then he threatens to immediately arrest flag-burners for engaging in one of the most obviously protected forms of First Amendment expression. One can certainly think the various components of wokeness—the cancelations of provocative speakers, haranguing of classmates and coworkers over imprecise use of language, and so on—were extremely annoying and reflective of an illiberal social trend without cosigning the Trump remedy. Patriotic correctness is also annoying.
Some will likely see Weiss' conquest of CBS, not as some legitimate victory for anti-wokeness, but rather yet another humiliating example of a major media organization sucking up to Trump. Paramount's merger with Skydance Media required the president's approval, and Trump had sued 60 Minutes, one of CBS's flagship news programs, over its Kamala Harris interview.
Viewing this development through a Trump lens is reductive, however. Weiss isn't Trump or MAGA, and though the mainstream media is already describing CBS News as facing a hostile takeover from a "Trump-friendly" journalist, The Free Press does run plenty of criticism of Trump and his movement, particularly on foreign policy. Their sensibilities are far more neoconservative than MAGA's, and the publication's uncompromising support for Israel is out of step with many of the right's more popular online figures these days: Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, Joe Rogan, and others. (To its credit, The Free Press does regularly feature debates on this subject, including this one between Coleman Hughes and Dave Smith.)
For her part, Weiss has announced no specific plans to radically rebrand or reformat CBS News. In a letter to all employees of the company, she outlined ten "core journalistic values" she thinks the company should exemplify under her leadership. They are all inoffensive and non-ideological. Even so, CBS News veterans are anonymously telling media reporters that they are "encouraging" Weiss not to interfere with 60 Minutes or CBS News Sunday Morning. That seems more than a little delusional on their parts.
